"What was that?" young Trunks jumped up and turned behind him. A cascade of clangs and noises that could only be described as steel being stressed to the point of tearing apart like wet paper lit up and showed no signs of slowing down.

"So, the cocky bastard is no longer even trying to hide…" Vegeta turned around. The right corner of his lip turned upward as she tightened the grip his gloves had over his stressed fists. The golden aura of Super Saiyan ignited around the Saiyan king. "You'll hear no complaints from me. The sooner we're done, the sooner we can go back to training."

However, Vegeta's confidence soon gave way to an entirely unfamiliar emotion. Jolts of electricity passed through the walls, the ceiling, and the floors. The lights went out with a nasty pop and sank the hallway in sprinkles of the hardened transparent alloy used for illumination. Vegeta's eyes opened wider and he could no longer keep his jaw shut and was ready to take punches and dish out insults and brags like he used to.

"Wh-What's going on? The floor's feeling… Wobbly…" young Trunks whined out as he spread his arms and tried to surf the shifting and waving floor. "It's like the whole Star's freaking out!" he exclaimed in terror after even the walls and the ceiling began waving and at times, it seemed like they would squeeze shut and snuff the life out of them.

The wall to Vegeta's left roared with a dull clang that transitioned into a pathetic wail of battered steel that had become soft as plaster. A sinewy humanoid with eggplant-colored skin and salmon-pink-colored, spiky, and wild hair stacking up at the back and an extended, reflective black vizor covering its eyes burst forth from the room behind that totaled wall. With the emergence of this man, the electrical impulses picked up and shook the room even further, but then, the magnetic phenomenon that had plagued the Capsule Corps Star in response to Super Android 20's wild power just ceased to be. Just as suddenly as it all started.

"I guess that Dr. Brief's daughter isn't just some pretty mascot in the lab. I genuinely am curious how she's counteracted my electromagnetic pull of Artificial Human No. 14's parts…" Super Artificial Human No. 20 reflected to himself before focusing his shades-like vizor on Vegeta whose aura had drowned the entire dimly lit room with a golden gleam.

"Dr. Brief's daughter? Are you talking about Bulma?" Vegeta wondered, looking mighty confident about his chances of thrashing this newly met Artificial Human despite not being able to sense his true combat power. "That's my arranged Earthling wife, you know. You'd better tread carefully, for you're on very thin ice here, scrap-man."

Two tiny red dots lit up from underneath Super Android 20's vizor. That was the only warning of the upcoming V-shaped line scarlet laser that illuminated the hallway blood-red. Vegeta ducked underneath it and stepped in under the energy beam, thrusting his fist into the gut of the Super Artificial Human. The force of impact lifted Dr. Gero off the ground lightly, though it didn't force him to keel over. The Super Saiyan turned around with a stiff backhand strike. It forced Super No. 20's eyes shut while the Saiyan swept under the Super Android's feet to throw his staunch opponent off-balance at last and then jumped up with a push kick to blast him away through multiple different hallway walls.

"Frieza and his brother enjoyed moves like that way too much. For a supposed inventor, you're not being all that inventive right now with your fighting skills," Vegeta cracked his knuckles and flexed his neck to both sides as a warm-up while his son cheered from his side. The King of Saiyans even spared a wayward look at his son, feeling an unexpected jitter in his gut that he had never felt in battle before. Vegeta had never thought he could experience new sensations and pleasures in battle, nor did he think he needed it, but having his son fighting beside him and cheer him on felt entirely different from even trouncing the most deserving of foes single-handedly.

Vegeta leaned his entire body forward, clenching his fist and igniting a blinding, white aura around him that vanished with sizzling sparkles. With the aura subsiding, all that was left behind was the buffed-up form of Super Vegeta with all the Super Saiyan signature features overblown to an almost cartoonish extent. The musculature, the hair, and the face utterly drenched in sheer rage, calling out for violence.

"Surely you realize, dear boy, I've not the slightest clue of what it is you're talking about?" Super Dr. Gero stood up as if being pushed off the ground by some supernatural force without having to stress a single muscle.

"Jeez, he's like a vampire from the movies or something!" young Trunks stumbled back with a creeped-out look on his face. "Ooh! Dad, can we see a horror movie together, all three of us, after you mop the floor with this guy?"

"What did I tell you, Trunks?" Super Vegeta gave his son a strict and scolding look.

"Right, I'll earn my playtime, dad, just wait!" young Trunks smacked himself on the cheeks, firing himself up before taking up a fighting stance.

"Oh, I'll give you a horror movie to remember, bo… Wait, are you going to send this toddler to fight…?" the very confused Super Android broke out of his terrifying proclamation to wonder before young Trunks rushed off right at him. Reacting to the sluggish pace of his assailant, the Super Artificial Human thrust a focused right that would've knocked young Trunks straight out if not left him crippled outright, but the punch appeared to phase clean through the rushing youth as if he was just a mirage.

By the time Super Dr. Gero noticed Vegeta's golden shine coming right at him, it was too late. The Super Saiyan crashed into his fearsome opponent with a flying kick to the jaw. Dr. Gero's neck stretched out with rubbery grunge to it as the staggering Super Android spat up mint-colored slobber, frothing from his mouth with foam. The Super Saiyan transitioned into a rising knee strike that rocked the Artificial Human's head up before turning around and unleashing a whole flurry of kicks that hammered the Super Android's head into the ceiling.

Bending his body horizontally, Vegeta shot his right foot into the exposed gut of the Super Android, blasting him through the ceiling and into the oversized core chamber where he'd have had more space to fight his opponent in. The shooting star of Dr. Gero produced multiple sonic booms around it and took off in a shimmering golden comet tail around it and expelled a robust explosion upon colliding with the ceiling of the core room. Given the immense size of the Capsule Corps Star, Vegeta may as well have sent his opponent soaring through an entire continent that way.

"Well…?" young Trunks pumped his hands with an ecstatic look on his face. "Are going to watch the movie with us now, dad!?"

"Tsk… Fine, I'll watch your stupid, pathetic, Earthling visual art motion picture," Vegeta grumbled. "Now, if you want to live to see your trivial movie night, stay low and out of trouble. This isn't an opponent you can stand up against."

"Right, I'm going to pitch in to save you at the last second like Edd Densing, the great monster hunter!" young Trunks pointed to himself, mirroring the cocky posturing of his father but an unexpected influx of rushing air broke the boy's stance and made him grab on to some rubble to keep himself on his feet. "Dad! You didn't even see my cool pose!" he yelled out at the back of his father, who nonchalantly took off to engage the recovering enemy.

Super Vegeta stopped in front of the sprawled out and indented into a cybernetic wall body of Dr. Gero's with a flashy vertical ring of gold before the entirety of the radiating energy withdrew into Super Vegeta's body while the King of Saiyans floated in front of his opponent with crossed arms. Super Artificial Human No. 20 forced his right arm out from the wreckage, then shoved the left one out as well before using his legs to force the entirety of his body out too.

"I can't believe you'd use your son like that. Have you no love for your offspring, Saiyan? If I were a cruel man, I'd teach you through experience what it means to lose a child…" Dr. Gero scolded the Super Saiyan for his reckless maneuver.

"Why would I deprive the young Saiyan prince of his spoils? I may be a strict father by the ridiculous Earthling standards, but I'm no heartless monster…" Vegeta smiled, filled to the brim with the satisfaction of his actions.

"Your skill in the art of combat is admirable, Your Majesty. I must admit that, despite having the vast intelligence of my predecessors at my storage units ready for processing, I cannot get a clear read on you," Dr. Gero admitted.

"Oh? What's with all the respect suddenly? Don't expect to butter up to me, drone. I've no sympathy or tolerance for fighting machines," Super Vegeta lashed out.

"Still sore about your defeat at my wife's hands?" Dr. Gero teased the Super Saiyan, forcing the golden aura to burst and unfurl to its fullest might. Bright enough to illuminate the whole core room to the brim.

"Don't be ridiculous! It's because Trunks keeps his robot toys all over the place I keep stepping all over them during training! And even then, when it's all his fault for being so careless with his stupid toys, I have to beam down and buy them for him!" Super Vegeta clenched his fists and moved them up, telegraphing the fact that he was looking for the primitive act of fisticuffs. "And don't give me that crap about not being able to read me. Your mind's somewhere else, isn't it? Don't you dare underestimate the King of all Saiyans by holding back and thinking about something else. You'll pay with everything your outdated processors consider valuable if you do!"

"Ah, so I am caught then," Super Dr. Gero patted his flamboyant suit, dusting it off while grabbing his collar and fixing how the outfit hung on him. "It's true that I found your blows so numb that I dozed off to rather think about how I will extract the parts of Artificial Human No. 14 without the use of my electromagnetism. No doubt your wife will make it extremely difficult for me."

"She does that sometimes," Super Vegeta forced air out his nose like a bull ready to lock his horns.

"Tell me then, King Vegeta, surely you noticed how little damage you've dealt with all of your rather humiliating beatdowns. You must have surmised what that means by now and how it relates to the difference in our battle power," Dr. Gero posed before the Saiyan royalty.

"It means that I haven't beaten on you hard enough yet!" Super Vegeta drew his arms back and charged at Super Artificial Human No. 20. An electric expulsion with a transparent, mirage-like ripple propelled the Super Android on a collision course with the charging Saiyan warrior. The two crashed at each other with a violent detonation of wild light and a turbulent flow of energy as the two rotated around each other, sending strikes and kicks each other's way but answering each other's genuine attempts to hurt each other.

Being the superior martial artist of the two, Vegeta triumphed by driving his fist into Dr. Gero's gut. A beam of energy burst from behind the Super Android's back as the force of impact reverberated throughout Dr. Gero's whole body and blasted off as an energy jet on its way out. Pursuing his airborne opponent, Vegeta crashed his foot with Dr. Gero's blocking elbow, then turned to try to catch his neck, but the Super Android blocked it with his forearm. Turning his whole body around, Vegeta slapped an energy blast into the Super Android's face before transitioning into a full-on volley of them.

While Dr. Gero was still coping with those, Vegeta soared through the smoke with a flying knee that rocked straight into Dr. Gero's nose. Vaulting over his head while soaring over his opponent, Vegeta sent the Super Android plummeting with an overhead kick.

"You're still focused on eating that junk and not on me, right? Get it memorized, the runt of the junkyard, I'm not letting you put your filthy hands all over the spoils of my super-elite fight, got it?" Super Vegeta smirked, pointing at himself with his finger while blowing out his chest. Super Dr. Gero dragged his hand across his lip to wipe away the grazes of dirt and froth that had soaked his mustache. Numbers began counting up his vizor on the right side, prompting the Super Android to look down and fix his gaze on another approaching Super Saiyan.

"You…" Vegeta muttered without having to turn back as he could sense Gohan soaring in to his side from a mile away now. "I thought I told you, and that dunce father of yours, not to bother coming in to meddle with my fight."

"Vegeta-san, you've no idea how dangerous of an opponent Dr. Gero is. He took Krillin-san out with a single attack before powering up. He's lulling you in to get you to lower your guard so that he can sneak off and assimilate Artificial Human No. 14," Gohan replied.

"What a clever boy, perhaps I should've broken his spine when I had the chance?" Dr. Gero chuckled to himself. A wrinkled smile stretched out across his face, shifting the shape of his burly mustache.

"If you meddle with my fight, brat, I'll consider you my enemy too, you hear me?" Vegeta clenched his fist, growling at Gohan.

"V-Vegeta-san!" Gohan tried reasoning with the Saiyan royalty but with Vegeta's golden aura igniting around him and the King's stern look fixing onto young Gohan's face, the teen realized that the super-elite was being dead-serious.

"Oh, why the animosity, Your Majesty?" Dr. Gero teased Vegeta. "Is it because I hurt your oh-so-sensitive pride by reminding you of your crushing defeat at the hands of…"

"Shut up!" Vegeta bellowed, soaring across the space separating the two with a left hook. The Super Android pushed his right forearm to absorb the strike. The Super Saiyan's eyes widened in reaction to how adamant the block he collided with was. Pushing through the burning sensation of blunt force trauma around his striking arm, Vegeta turned around with a backhand slam but Dr. Gero's arms slithered from behind, securing a full nelson from under Super Vegeta's arms and clasping his arms behind the Super Saiyan's head.

With a primitive growl, Super Vegeta swung like a bell and made his body limber, driving his swinging soles into Dr. Gero's gut. Forcing his arms out with a nasty push that nearly dislocated both of Vegeta's shoulders on the spot. Spitting out a berserk battle cry, Vegeta rushed at Dr. Gero with a flurry of fists that the Super Android was forced to go on the defensive to absorb with open palms. The Super Android's grip locked around Vegeta's forearms, pulling him in for a counterattack, but the King of Saiyans slipped down under the strike with pitch-perfect timing and rode the momentum with a flying kick for an answer.

"I'm done with all of you eating up each other's scrap and coming back!" Super Vegeta growled, extending his arms to the sides as he ignited massive energy masses around each hand that spanned out all the way to his elbow. The enraged Super Saiyan waved his arms, lobbing these super-sized, shimmering Ki blasts directly at his opponent before producing another one in a split instant while he was drawing the arm back.

The reckless bombardment had created an expanding golden dome of unstable energy around the overwhelmed Super Android while Super Vegeta kept on swinging his arms again and again. Just when his movements had become slower, as if his arms had grown completely null, the King of Saiyans drew his arms back over his head and expelled a mighty full-powered energy wave at his opponent that had sent the expanding energy dome into overdrive to where it ruptured and flared up with an all-encompassing shine. When all was fired and done, Super Vegeta panted with the sole vein still pulsing on his forehead and his eyelids looking heavy for the rampaging warrior to keep open.

"There, away with you…" Vegeta muttered when the smoke cleared out and there was no trace of Super Dr. Gero.

"N…No!" Gohan's eyes widened as he began throwing his gaze around like a madman. "He's not destroyed, he slipped away! We must…"

Before the two could communicate their strategy with each other, the entire core chamber lit up red, as if whatever alarms had been going off in the entire station had finally caught up to the core chamber as well. A chilling cry preceded a metallic clank and the limp body of young Trunks shooting through the wall and bouncing off of countless pipes and super-computers before slamming into a pipeline that held him suspended over an abyssal drop. Super Android 20 emerged from the torn hole in the wall, clasping a handful of scrap pieces in his hands.

"All that an Artificial Human needs to become a Super Artificial Human is the processing microchip from the central processing unit, the explosive device, and the Infinite Energy Reactor. That is why those very pieces are made to be dozens of times tougher than the rest of the body to destroy. Because of their size and function, they're a lot easier to reinforce too…" Dr. Gero said in a husky tone while looking at handfuls of scrap he had pulled from wherever Bulma had concealed it. "From what the data in my records suggest, Puri has upgraded the assimilation process and became capable of assimilating still functional technology. Though these rednecks stood no chance of replicating her genius, so I'm stuck with the outdated and primitive assimilation method."

"See? That's what I've been trying to…" Gohan turned to Vegeta only to exclaim and dash out of the way as the Super Saiyan had launched another barrage of Ki attacks at the emerged Super Android.

"You bastard! I'll obliterate you to the tiniest lump of scrap for this!" Super Vegeta howled out while his Ki changed color from the usual golden gleam of the Super Saiyan energy, becoming blaze-red. Despite the Super Saiyan's best efforts, this barrage of Ki blasts simply bounced off of a barely visible energy barrier surrounding Super Artificial Human No. 20.

With one final clasp of the smashed pieces of Artificial Human No. 14, Super Gero let them phase through his body to begin the assimilation process. Wasting almost no time, the twitching Super Android ripped his colorful tuxedo open and left it fluttering in the rampant air pressure that his transformation had made around him. His body began rapidly expanding in bulk, beefing out to cartoonish proportions, while veins began rippling across his bulged muscles with complex networked formations.

Dr. Gero's previously eggplant-colored skin now gained a deeper blue shade to it while his facial features stretched out and sharpened. Not a single wrinkle remained on the Super Android's face as his neck struggled to keep up with the sudden shift in musculature. The genius inventor of Artificial Human technology bellowed, growled, and snarled in torment, twitching and jerking as his body inflated before the eyes of the shocked Super Saiyans. With the final twitches, Dr. Gero was no longer grunting, he was laughing his chest out, riding the high of the limitless power he's built up. The spiky pink hair had turned tiger-orange.

"Yes… This power… I've not even theorized about such an upgrade being possible. This is so mighty it leaves the world of power that is Super Android altogether. No… This… This is the boundless might of an Ultimate Android," the Ultimate Android proclaimed in a deeper and grungier voice than before, admiring the ridiculously overblown musclebound perfection of his new form.